Assignment Sequence Overview
- Assignment One: Conjectures
- In this assignment,
you will study an issue in order to discover how that issue is depicted
by people
who are interested in it. Depictions of a state of affairs are called “conjectures”
in rhetoric.The
goal of the assignment is to understand that people depict issues differently
because they
are advancing their own interests that arise from culture and history and
to explore those interests.
- Assignment Two: Values (Revised)
- In this assignment, you will be asked to become a spokesperson for one of the parties in the debate with whom you agree. You are going to write an editorial or letter (2-4 pages) in which you try to persuade one opposing party that you identified in the first paper to agree with your conjectures about the issue.
- Assignment Three: Visual Rhetoric
- In this assignment, you will return to the issue you explored in assignments one and two, but this time you will focus your attention on a visual representation of the issue and determine how the image(s) structures the arguments about the issue. The goal of the assignment is to analyze the rhetorical features of an image within a historical and social context.
- Assignment Four: Proposal
- In this assignment, you may stay with the same issue or you may choose another topic. You will either advocate that something be done or some procedure be changed or you may argue for or against a policy proposal that has actually been made. The goal of the assignment is to convince an audience that some action should or should not be taken in response to a particular situation or problem.